In today's global market it is increasingly important for any human-readable output created by computer software to be internationalised. A common mechanism used to achieve internationalisation is the use of message bundles. Rather than hard coding the human-readable text a key is provided instead and this key is then used to look up the message in the associated bundle. By providing different message bundles for different languages the software becomes internationalised without the source code itself containing any text that is specific to a particular language. In addition to using a key to lookup a message, a typical message bundle implementation will allow additional parameters to be provided that are then substituted into the message at defined points.
European Patent 1315086 describes a method and processing unit for providing localised versions of a software application allowing maintenance of a single code version. Text elements may be centrally maintained and handled in a text element file, while the code may only include references to the individual text elements at specified locations.
A major problem with current message bundle implementations is that they are entirely reliant on the software developer specifying a message bundle correctly, specifying a key that exists in the message bundle, as well as the correct number of parameters to be substituted into the message. Should the developer get this wrong the end-user may be presented with an obscure error code rather than the intended concise description of the solution to the problem they are experiencing. This inevitably leads to a marked decrease in customer satisfaction and an increased number of calls being made to customer support,
There are a number of known solutions to the problem of ensuring that software source code conforms to sets of configurable rules many of which have been productised such as Parasoft's JTest and IBM's Rational Application Developer 6.0. However, these existing solutions are unable to cope with the inherent complexity of validating code that is internationalised through the use of message bundles—they are not capable of identifying the relationship between a method call and the message bundle from which it will extract its internationalised text.